Shakespeare’s searing drama chronicles the ruthless ascension of a king and the devastation he leaves in his wake as he gains power over the realm.Featuring stage, film, and television actor, Faran Tahir as Richard III.

$60 Friend Section Chairs
Chairs are a $60 donation until
July 17
and then increase to $75during performance weeks.

Free Shakespeare on the Common is made possible each year through a combination of grants, sponsorships, and donations collected through the Friends Section program. The Friends Section consists of lawn chairs set in front of the stage for your convenience.
Individuals can reserve a chair at a performance with a donation of $60 per chair, with all proceeds going directly towards the cost of the production. After July 17th, chairs increase to $75 during performance weeks.
Online reservations can be made up to 5 hours prior to the performance.

Individuals can reserve a chair at a performance with a donation of $60 per chair, with all proceeds going directly towards the cost of the production. After July 17th, chairs increase to $75 during performance weeks.

Friends Section chairs are preassigned.You will be seated at the performance by a member of our team.You must select the performance date you would like to attend at time of purchase or seats will not be reserved.

All donations are NON-REFUNDABLE and NON-TRANSFERABLE. Proceeds from the Friends Section help keep Shakespeare on the Common free for all!

Significance

Competition, while often seen as beneficial, can escalate into destructive conflict. This occurs, for instance, when athletes sabotage each other or when rival executives get caught up in a career-derailing fight. These escalations into conflict are especially likely among status-similar competitors, who are fraught with discordant understandings of who is superior to whom. We examine the link between status similarity and conflict as well as the conditions under which this link holds. We find that status-similar Formula One drivers are more prone to collide, especially when they are age-similar, perform well, are embedded in a stable role structure, and feel safe. Our inquiry deepens our understanding of when violent conflict emerges and can guide conflict prevention efforts.

Abstract

This article investigates the factors that escalate competition into dangerous conflict. Recent sociological theorizing claims that such escalations are particularly likely in dyads of structurally equivalent people (i.e., actors who have the same relations with the same third parties). Using panel data on Formula One races from 1970 through 2014, we model the probability that two drivers collide on the racetrack (an observable trace of conflict) as a function of their structural equivalence in a dynamic network of competitive relationships. Our main hypothesis, that the likelihood of conflict rises with structural equivalence, receives empirical support. Our findings also show that the positive association between structural equivalence and conflict is neither merely a matter of contention for official position nor an artifact of inherently hostile parties spatially exposed to each other. Our analyses further reveal that this positive association is concentrated in a number of theoretically predictable conditions: among age-similar dyads, among stronger performers, in stable competitive networks, and in safe, rather than dangerous, weather conditions. Implications for future research on conflict, networks, and tournaments are discussed.

Competition, although often viewed positively as a contributor to social welfare, can escalate into destructive conflict. The classical sociologists Park and Burgess (
1
) discussed the escalation of competition into conflict much as one might describe a phase transition: as heat converts water to steam, a shift in social context can turn dispassionate competitors into warring enemies. Well-known cases range from Thomas Edison bullying and slandering Nikola Tesla in the “war of the currents” to Michael Tyson biting Evander Holyfield’s ear in the boxing ring. Gould (
2
) theorized that such escalations of competition into conflict are especially likely in dyads of structurally equivalent people; that is, two people who have the same relations with the same third parties (
3
). In Gould’s theory, such dyads are particularly conflict-prone because they are fraught with discordant understandings of who is superior to whom. Unlike those in obviously hierarchical relations—manager and subordinate, for example, or professor and student—for whom norms of deference are fixtures of the social background, dyads marked by structural equivalence are susceptible to ambiguous conceptions of their relationship and thus to incompatible rules for interaction. Competition for deference and status may then escalate dangerously, as when one young man ends up killing a near-peer in the wake of a “little ol’ argument […] over nothing at all.” (ref.
4
, p. 59).

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